‘Stranger Things: Tales from ’85’ Should Be More Like a Saturday Morning Cartoon

This story first ran in the animation newsletter “Sketch to Screen.” Subscribe here to receive a new entry every Thursday.

There was a time, around the ’80s and ’90s, when any high-grossing, vaguely child-leaning blockbuster film could get an animated syndicated TV spinoff. Some, like “The Real Ghostbusters,” were pretty good or at least memorable enough to endure beyond footnote status. Others, like the animated “Beetlejuice” spinoff where Beetlejuice is a friendly, helpful ghoul and not a villain, or the 1991 “Little Shop of Horrors” animated series that had to cut “of Horrors” out of the title, feel like self-parodies of sanitized, edgeless children’s shows. 

I thought a lot about these types of shows while watching “Stranger Things: Tales From ’85,” which premiered on Netflix this past Thursday. An “in-canon” CG animated spinoff of Netflix’s flagship franchise, “Tales from ’85” is ostensibly a little more prestigious than those forgotten ’80s and ’90s Saturday Morning cartoon block fillers. But watching the 10 episodes released April 23, it feels clear that the show was born from the same place as a “Rambo: The Force of Freedom” or “Toxic Crusaders,” as a franchise brand extension rather than as a project the creators (showrunner Eric Robles and Jennifer Muro developed the series) had any passion for. 

Joylessly replaying the hits from the original series, “Tales From ’85” sticks itself in a creative rut from the get-go by pointlessly situating itself as a midquel between the second and third seasons of the Duffer Brothers’ breakout hit. That deeply constrains everything that occurs in the show’s first outing, which can’t see Mike, El, Dustin, Lucas, or Max grow as characters in ways that bump up against their arcs from the original show, or let the new addition Nikki (Odessa A’zion) become too firmly entrenched in their lives. The mystery, about a monster from the Upside Down that has been left behind and buried under the snow since the portal between the two worlds was last closed, is a facsimile of your average “Stranger Things” season without the complications — the interlocking narrative structure, the great performances from the original cast (all replaced here with soundalikes of varying quality) — that made the show worthwhile. 

Although “Stranger Things” has always had a young fanbase, and was in its earliest years mostly following middle schoolers, the series wasn’t exactly aimed at kids: to the extent that the carefully four-quadrant tested franchise had a target demographic, it was adults who remember and were nostalgic for being kids in the ’80s. So the show didn’t shy away from getting bloody, dark, murky, with plenty of curse words here and there. “Tales From ’85” was clearly pitched as the kid-friendly Saturday Morning Cartoon version of the franchise, and accordingly, its visuals — from Flying Bark Productions — are bright, colorful, and blandly safe (the series frequently resembles that of a Telltale episodic adventure game from the 2010s). The monsters the kids fight are goofier-looking than the Demogorons or Mind Flayers from the original show, and although they pose a tepid threat to the kids, you don’t see the corpses and blood that often decorated the original show’s setpieces.

In all honesty, “Tales From ’85” could have probably benefited from going even more kid-friendly, and being far less faithful to its source material than it was likely forced to. The animated spin-offs of old had no issue throwing out elements of the original films that didn’t fit, or ignoring pesky concepts like continuity entirely, and they were all better for it. One show I kept thinking of while watching “Tales From ’85” was 1998’s “Godzilla: The Series,” a sequel series to the first American “Godzilla” film that had to retcon and rearrange the events from the film it was spinning off from to make its premise work. It ended up being way, way better than its source material, a nifty monster-of-the-week show that paid loving homage to the franchise’s Japanese origins. 

I’m admittedly not the biggest “Stranger Things” fan in the world, but even I know that what draws fans to it is less about the Upside Down or the mythology and more about hanging out with the characters. A lower-stakes, episodic spinoff of the franchise that’s about the kids solving a variety of cases around Hawkins would probably be a more fun, charming, and especially more creatively interesting than what the repetitive “Tales From ’85” manages to accomplish. 

But episodic TV of that nature isn’t something that Netflix has ever shown much interest in or ability in executing, and the Duffers’ comments about the future of “Stranger Things” seem to indicate a belief that canon is sacred. So, “Tales From ’85” must exist in the state it is now, a stretched-out and thinly drawn “Stranger Things” mystery that feels like a kiddie pool version of the original show. It may be more polished and refined than something like “The Real Ghostbusters,” but it’s also somehow blander, an IP extension that renders the live-action franchise in animation without taking any of the risk the medium change offers.

Predictably, the season ends with a stinger promising a new adventure for the kids in a future season. But if “Tales From ’85” must remain constrained by the flagship show, there feels like little point in following this new adventure when we already know where its ending.